Alternatives to Politics

If politics is about who controls the guns (and it is), what alternatives can we create? Here are some ideas:

Most people view “law” as a series of statements about what we value. As in, “we hold marriage to be between a man and a woman”. But those kinds of “laws” are just touchy-feely comments added in to make you feel nice. They’re not really laws. Real laws specify who lives and who dies; who spends their life in jail, and who goes free.

We could perhaps extract the one from the other. Statements of values need to be made, and are valuable in and of themselves. We could easily establish a universally recognized body which would make appropriate statements about the values of the nation. Such an entity would be known as a “Court”, but would have no connection to an executive branch (unlike in the current system).

Such an entity could even judge cases, and make decisions in difficult controversies. When neighbors fought, they could bring their cases before this Court. But because this entity would have no executive branch, it would be very inclined to bring mutually acceptable resolutions to bear for both parties. When this failed, the judgment of the Court would be held by the country as most likely being the truth, and people who were aware of the case would use this information in choosing how to behave towards the guilty party.

Any executive groups that developed, like security or police forces, would use the judgment of the Court as the basis of how people are treated. If they interacted with a criminal who had been judged guilty, they might feel free to lock that person up for an appropriate amount of time. The security force would be hesitant to abuse their power, as they would rely on the endorsement of the Court to drum up new business.

In this case, we’ve extracted violence from any kind of government-like organization, and put it in the hands of small, de-centralized citizen groups. That may be the recipe for less control, but it’s also certainly the recipe for less fascism.

On the other hand, we’ve switched from creating “laws” to having a “central standards organization”, much as we have for web programming. In web programming, we have no laws, we just have recommendations from a central, trusted group. And they accomplish more than laws ever could.